Primo Levi - The Last Interview review: Final words with the great writer

By Steven Carroll

June 29, 2018 — 12.15am

Primo Levi: The Last Interview

Giovanni Tesio

Primo Levi: The Last Interview

Polity, $28.95

These conversations – recorded over three days in January 1987 – were research for an authorised biography of the writer. A fourth interview was scheduled but Primo Levi took his own life a few days before. That silence hangs over this slim volume in which the author of If This Is a Man and other classics talks about his youth, family, friends, schooling, marriage, factory work and being in the Italian Resistance: the story stopping just before he was captured and sent to Auschwitz. His tone is reserved and detached, as if speaking of someone else's life. Often he's just talking about everyday things such as memories of holidays and teachers, but it's engrossing. Woven in are big events such as the rise of fascism, his father joining to avoid trouble. Fascinating snapshot of the life and times of one of Italy's finest.